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The thing is, admissions to elite universities is almost never about test scores. Immigrant parents from countries like China and India are used to test scores mattering a lot. In those countries, your absolute score on the National Exam determines not only your placement into a university, but also what fields are available to you for study. The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test. So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions. It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint? |
People involved in college admissions (as you said you are in another comment) love to say things like this. If I based my understanding of the world solely on statements by college admission officers at, say, Duke, I would guess that thousands upon thousands of high school students each year get literally perfect scores (cumulative score of 2400 across three sections of the test) each year. In fact, only a few hundred do, not even enough to fill the entering class at Harvard each year.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percen...
Literally "perfect" scores are still quite rare. Caltech is just about the only college small enough to enroll only perfect scorers on the SAT (but not all perfect scorers apply to Caltech). As a consequence of this, all United States colleges without exception, by the pigeonhole principle, admit students with less-than-perfect SAT scores.
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
Your point is well taken that college admission offices look for student characteristics other than test scores. They always have, and they always will. But if a college is found to practice racial discrimination, it is violating the law, period. If a college claims, in response to a Department of Education inquiry, that it is looking for some other student characteristic that just happens to disfavor students from [insert race or ethnicity category here], it had better be able to identify that characteristic with specificity and not simply ASSUME that students of one category or another have more "sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc." than other students.